


A Bit of Something Better than Goodbye

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Banter, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:22:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22044022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy might just manage to stop Ed from leaving if he lays all of his cards on the table – but is it better of him not to play his hand?
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 46
Kudos: 932
Collections: FMA Gift Exchange 2019





	A Bit of Something Better than Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GearHead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GearHead/gifts).



> A fic for Gearhead for the 2019 FMA Gift Exchange! They wanted to participate but weren't able to, so I wrote them a little gift anyway. ♥ I tried to get a good combination of "angst with a happy ending" and "banter"! I hope you enjoy it. ♥
> 
> (P.S. Language warning on this one – I would rate it a steep PG for language if I had the option, but alas…!)

There is, perhaps, some measure of truth to the accusations of procrastination that have been flung at Roy over the years: he puts off asking the question until past nine o’clock, because he doesn’t really want to know the answer.

But it can’t wait forever. Nothing ever can; nothing ever does.

He swallows, clears his throat, and tries to do the same for his expression. “What time is your train?”

Ed glances up from an intense scrutiny of the physics textbook written by The Enemy, who has earned this title by making flippant and factually incorrect disparaging comments about some of Ed’s recent work. “Huh? Oh.” Ed glances down again, and his eyes sweep back and forth, but Roy can tell that he’s not reading. “I dunno. Don’t actually have a ticket yet.”

Roy’s heart does something stupid. At least it suits the rest of him. “I thought you were leaving tomorrow.”

“Planning to,” Ed says. He drums the still-so-much-softer fingers of his restored right hand on the open page of the book, and his brow crinkles, and Roy wants to catch his hand and kiss every knuckle and every fingertip—wants to smooth the lines off of his forehead and stroke his hair back and _plead_ , and…

And they both know that Ed deserves better. That’s why this is happening, isn’t it?

Fool that he is, Roy had never dreamed that it would come to this—that _he_ would come to this.

“I don’t want to commit to a schedule or anything,” Ed says. “Figure I’ll just get there when I get there and hop on the next train that sounds good. If I keep going southwest, I’ll end up in Creta eventually.”

“Cardinal directions are helpful for that sort of thing,” Roy says.

Ed used to buy tickets well in advance and announce the times of his departure to anyone who would listen, but things have changed. It’s perfectly possible that that used to be a feature primarily of the work, of the life, of the missions; it’s perfectly possible that so little of the world fell under his control in those days that he made a point of pinning down the little things that did.

Surely Ed is tired, by now, of being subject to someone else’s whims. Surely he’s earned a chance or two, or three, or a thousand, to set the rules for his own life and refuse to let anyone else influence his choices. Surely he’s overdue for that particular privilege. Surely it’s time that he stopped letting other people’s preferences dictate his decisions.

It’s well past time that Roy let him.

Some of the selfish impulses are too deeply-ingrained to be resisted, though: Roy tilts his head towards the window, where a white lace of frost creeps up at the corners of the pane, undeterred by the fire in the hearth just past Ed’s feet.

“Are you sure this is a good time to be traveling?” Roy asks. It’s the last-ditch hope of a failure of a friend, but he supposes that at least it _is_ a valid question.

“Not a good time around here,” Ed says, wedging his fingernail underneath the top-right corner of the page he’d be turning soon if he’d actually been reading all this time. “But it’s definitely the best time to go to Creta. I read that there’s lots of places there that stay warm _all_ year.”

“Warm?” Roy asks. “Or hot? My understanding is that you have—” He holds his hands up, palms facing one another, to indicate a rather narrow segment of a spectrum. “—an ideal window of temperatures, above or below which—”

“Well, at least I can function through precipitation,” Ed fires back, but he’s trying to hide a grin. It fades again just as swiftly as it appeared. His knuckles trail along the always-aching join of metal on his thigh. “I got an almanac. I’ll figure it out.”

Roy wants to say things that he shouldn’t—that he can’t. Roy wants to say _I swear to you I’ll buy you every last down jacket that Central City’s best boutiques can offer. I will turn up at your little office at the university with blankets and cups of soup and insulated mugs of tea. I will scramble home to light the fire before you get here every night, and I will study for a certificate as a masseur so that I can be sure that my hands will soothe some measure of your pain._

Ed has given him more than he ever merited and asked him for nothing. Roy can’t burden him with this—with the yearning, with the wanting, with the adulation. With how infuriatingly easy it was, in the end, subject to the full force of everything Ed is, to fall for him. That’s not what Ed signed up for. Roy should be down on both knees professing gratitude, not sitting here and searching for some last clever twist of reason that might trick Edward Elric into staying even one more night.

Ed deserves so much more than manipulation—Roy has to be better than this.

“You are,” he says, “remarkably adaptable.”

Ed wrinkles his nose. “I dunno if I’d say _that_. Really all it is, is that I learned pretty early that hanging on by the very ends of your fingertips still counts as hanging on.”

He pauses.

And then he narrows his eyes.

He looks at the newspaper in Roy’s hands, and then at Roy; and back, and forth, and— “Your eyesight’s going.”

Roy listens to his heart in his ears for a few seconds. He has to play this very carefully, but he has no idea what the score is, or what the rules are, or where the gameboard ends. “I’m not sure I would say that.”

“You’re holding the newspaper at least two inches closer than you used to,” Ed says.

Roy cannot afford to assign meaning to that sentence—meaning that Ed likely never intended to imbue it with. Roy cannot afford to extrapolate. He cannot afford to assume.

It’s entirely possible that Ed has been mathematically cataloguing Roy’s most trivial habits because he is Ed, and that is the sort of thing an Elric does in any situation, regardless of the particulars; rather than because it _means_ anything. It’s more than just possible: it’s the most likely explanation. Ed doesn’t operate by the same principles as other people. Ed exists in a universe where the laws diverge, and he rewrites them, and nothing means the same thing as it would in the world where Roy has to live.

“I think your conclusion relies on an inferential leap,” Roy says. He’s read all of Ed’s papers, and that is an anomaly in and of itself. “One set of data points, not even remotely isolated—”

Ed is not even pretending to listen to him. “Shit, okay, and I started hanging out here—” He unofficially moved in. “—four months ago, so if we’re talking about you losing two inches in four months… and visual acuity is more or less measured in increments of twenty feet, right?” He drops onto his back on the couch and lays an arm over his eyes, gesturing in the air with the other hand in a way that bears more than a passing resemblance to scratching numbers on a chalkboard. “So a two-hundred-and-forty-inch increment divided by the two inches you lost is a hundred and twenty, and that divided by four months makes thirty months, sum total—and this is _assuming_ that the degeneration follows a linear progression rather than an accelerative one—”

“Ed,” Roy says, despite the fact that it feels like he’s freefalling down a mineshaft in the dark.

“—so in two and a half years,” Ed continues, undaunted as ever, “ _including_ the past four months, you’ll’ve lost a whole gradation, here, and you’ll be at twenty-forty. Were you at twenty-twenty before? I’ll ask Marcoh. We should factor that in. Can you request that they print stuff bigger for you at HQ? I don’t feel like they’d be down for that, but maybe you’re important enough now tha—”

“Ed,” Roy says, louder this time. “That’s enough.”

Ed uncovers his face, although really only so that he can twist around and give Roy a reprimanding look. “I’m not even close to done.”

“I know,” Roy says. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

At least he has somehow retained just enough dignity not to add _Or ever_.

“Why?” Ed asks. “Not talking about it isn’t going to make it any less inevitable. Better to sort it out now while there’s time to plan stuff. Isn’t that your thing? Planning stuff?”

“As far as I can tell,” Roy says, “there is not a single aspect of it that we can solve tonight.”

“Not with that attitude,” Ed says. “At least now you’re thinking about it. What’s so wrong with ripping the bandage off?”

“This isn’t a one-time ripping,” Roy says. He has also retained just enough dignity to recognize how unfortunate it is that he was made to speak those words with his own mouth and hear them with his own ears. Truly the world is merciless. “If this is, as you are positing, the rest of my life that we’re talking about, I will be ripping that bandage off every single day from here on out, likely sometimes repeatedly.”

“That’s good, though,” Ed says. “The more you do it, the more you train your body to recover faster before you can punish it again. Your platelets get the hint.”

Narrowly, Roy resists the urge to sigh extremely loudly. “It is… very much like you to anthropomorphize blood cells, isn’t it?”

“Science made you a fact guy,” Ed says, “but politics made you a story guy. So when I talk to you, I try to split the difference.”

Roy holds a hand over his chest so that he’ll look particularly offended. “Are you blaming _me_ for your personification habits?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “No regrets, since you’re obviously trying to distract me from the subject of you gradually going blind.”

At least that murders the tender wisps of remorse that had been gathering in Roy’s chest and allows him to dive right into the question that he still hadn’t quite wanted to ask: “Why are you going to Creta?”

“Why does anybody go to Creta?” Ed says. He makes an obnoxiously large point of settling down on the couch, which means he’s about to tell the truth. “I’m tired of being in the way. Everybody I know is doing their own thing, and doing better.”

“That’s a very biased generalization,” Roy says.

“Obviously,” Ed says. “And I should leave the generalizations to you, since you’re a general—” He doesn’t even pause to notice Roy’s heart skittering at the way he winks to reinforce the offhanded pun; he drops right back into the world-weariness without a moment’s delay. “—but it’s still _true_. Al wanted to go study in Aerugo, so now he’s doing that, and he’s doing a killer job of it. Winry’s business is doing better than ever; she’s so popular that she can barely keep up, but she _likes_ it that way, because she’s some sort of workaholic monster or something. And Ling wanted to be Emperor, and now he is; and you want to be Führer, and you’re getting there, and…” He also doesn’t leave Roy with more than a quarter of a second to process how staggeringly surreal it is to be counted on that list. “It’s not that I don’t want those things _for_ all of you. All that stuff matters, and it’s important, and we did all the shit that we did specifically so that everybody would be able to do things like that someday.”

“Well,” Roy says, “we also did it because the alternative was frequently certain death.”

“You know what I mean,” Ed says. His arm settles over his eyes again. “Everybody’s got something they’re working on now except for me. I’m not _doing_ anything. I just… am. And I’m in the way.”

“Hm,” Roy says. It’s easier than trying to contain any of the rest of what he feels within a single sentence; at least a meaningless interjection is relatively safe. “What do you _want_ to do?”

“I have no idea,” Ed says, so matter-of-factly that it’s slightly chilling. “I never thought I’d get this far.” He digs the heels of both hands into his eye sockets and rubs at them. “Teaching is fine,” he says. “I like it a lot some of the time. But I’m just… I’m doing it so that I’m doing something. To stay busy. What I _want_ —I don’t know. I want to… not get in the way of anybody else’s hard-earned fucking happiness. But you can’t prove a negative, and _wanting_ a negative is just as bad, right?”

“If I say ‘no’,” Roy says, “will you accuse me of propagating further negativity?”

“Yes,” Ed says. “That’s beside the point anyway.”

“Perhaps,” Roy says, despite the way that everything in him keens and howls at him to keep his damn mouth shut, “this is a good thing, then—the trip. It’ll give you some time to examine yourself and try new things and see if anything sparks a new interest that you might want to pursue.”

Ed lays very still with his hands over his eyes for several more seconds before remarking, very flatly, “You sound like a self-help book.”

“One does one’s best,” Roy says. “In the hopes of not being negative, I’m trying to find a silver lining for you.”

Ed’s tone veers snide, but Roy sees the tiniest hint of a mischievous smirk around the side of his hand. “So you’re saying that it’s _my_ fault that you sound like a self-help book.”

“That is not even remotely what I said,” Roy says. “That doesn’t live in the same area code as what I said, let alone the same neighborhood. That probably speaks a different language than what I said. That—”

“Good,” Ed says. “Maybe it speaks Cretan, so I can take it with me, and it can translate.”

“Is there a particular reason,” Roy says, delicately, “that you feel compelled to go so far?”

“I don’t want to run into anybody who feels responsible for me,” Ed says. “I’ve spent a _lot_ of time relying on people, and imposing on ’em, and… it’s time to be… independent of everybody else. Not have anybody else lookin’ out for me because they feel like they have to, or out of force of habit, or both of the above.”

“I suspect that a lot of people enjoy looking out for you,” Roy says. “Which ought to come as no surprise, since _you_ enjoy looking out for others.”

“That’s bullshit,” Ed says.

It’s not.

All of this began at a party at Gracia’s—just a gathering of friends, purportedly, but in the interests of keeping the food-related labor equitable, everyone was supposed to make something to share. Roy had made a trip to the store, where he had acquired several bottles of wine.

He’d expected to get some well-deserved shit from a number of the stalwarts, but he hadn’t anticipated that Ed would be among the shit-givers. He had done his best to hold his ground.

“I refuse,” he’d said, “to be humiliated for not having had time to cultivate various other skills in addition to the ones necessitated by the life I’ve had.”

Ed had snorted, smirked, and said, “That’s a cute way of saying ‘I don’t know how to survive’,” and Roy’s stomach had… flipped. Up and over and inside out. Just like that.

“I’m extremely adept at surviving,” Roy had said. “Just ask any of the numerous people and things that have tried to kill me.”

“Right,” Ed said. “Well, just in case, I’m going to turn up at your house tomorrow and teach you how to pour a bowl of cereal.”

Roy had expected the round of high-fives and back-clapping from several members of a certain traitorous team.

What Roy had not expected was for Ed to follow through with that promise-slash-offer-slash-threat by turning up on Roy’s doorstep the following Saturday.

For a very, very long second, they’d stared at each other—Roy’s side of that stare being utterly uncomprehending—until he’d managed to tear his focus away from the brightness of Ed’s eyes for long enough to notice the rather sarcastically cellophane-wrapped bowl, ornate spoon, and cereal box that Ed was holding as a parody of a gift basket.

Ed had said, “Are you ready for your inaugural lesson in survival skills?”

Roy had said, “I should have _known_.”

Ed had said, “How late were you out last night?”

Roy had said, “Up, not out.”

Ed had said, “Whatever. What volume of coffee do we need to add to this equation to transmute you back into a person with a brain?”

Roy had said, “A lot,” and then “At least let me go shave.”

Ed had said, “Have you ever seen me stand on ceremony in my whole damn life? Don’t worry about it. C’mon, we’re gonna make breakfast. _Real_ breakfast.” He’d picked up a shopping bag that Roy hadn’t even noticed. “Unless you thought I was serious about the cereal, in which case I think you underestimate my animosity for milk in all its demonic forms. You got a cast-iron skillet, or are we going to have to improvise?”

At first, Ed had come by so irregularly that Roy had refused on principle to let himself get excited about the prospect of the incomparably aggressive knock, but then—partly under the thin guise of wanting access to the rarer components of Roy’s personal library—the visits had grown so consistent that Roy simply had a key cut for him. Ed had looked shocked about it. Roy had shrugged and said something scintillatingly witty about food being the way to a man’s deadbolts, and they’d gone about the rest of their evening more or less the same way as usual.

If he’s being honest—which Roy tries his very hardest to do as rarely as is possible, of course—he’s terrified about the way this house will feel when Ed no longer inhabits it more often than not. He is terrified of the thought of the ever-expanding silence, and the emptiness that will follow it into _him—_ through his ears and down into the middle of his chest, from which the stain will suffuse him all the way to his fingertips. He knows. He remembers. He’s been there before.

Being alone is one thing. Being without Ed—without someone who lights up every room; who warms up every space; who gives every day a little bit more meaning—is entirely another.

But if leaving is what Ed needs, or even just what he thinks he needs, then Roy wants him to have it. Roy will say what he has to, and do what he has to, and endure. He’s been through worse, after all. He’s made it through everything leading up to this.

“I think we may have to agree to disagree on that point,” Roy says. They’ve gotten so much better at that particular practice that it’s not so much to ask anymore. “But I think… well. What we see in ourselves as the most tiresome, because we live with it every day, is surprisingly often someone else’s favorite thing about us.”

Ed glowers at him. “That’s also bullshit. You’re two for two, Mustang.”

Roy might well go blind someday rather soon. The best way to ensure that he never forgets the way the firelight plays on Ed’s face is to brand the image into his brain with the searing force of his own fear.

It’s time to be brave, whether either of them makes it out of this unscathed or not.

“I like how loud you are,” Roy says. “And I like that you make a mess. Well—most of the time. Almost all of it. And I like that you sometimes forget that you had started out participating in a conversation instead of delivering a monologue, because you’re just so fascinated by the progress of your own thoughts. And I like how toweringly devoted you are to the people that you love.”

Ed hasn’t stopped eyeing Roy with a touch of mistrust, but the way that he had to set his jaw when Roy was only a few words in belied him immediately.

“Whatever,” Ed says. “That’s not… I mean, it’s obviously not… working.”

Roy dares to ask the necessary question: “What isn’t?”

“Me,” Ed says. “The way I go about being a person and whatever shit. If it was any good, then…” He folds his hands behind his head, closes his eyes, and swallows—deliberate, calculated false casualness. “Then Al wouldn’t’ve left.”

“There is _no_ evidence,” Roy says, “of a causal relationship between those two things.”

Ed opens his eyes, fixes them on Roy for another second, and then half-shrugs, which is hardly any more convincing than the rest of it.

“He left on a specific temporary basis,” Roy says, “to explore an avenue that was closed to both of you for a long time. Why would that have anything to do with how you go about being a person?”

“Sounds stupid when you say it,” Ed mutters, which Roy has to admit might be true.

He holds his tongue, though—and his breath, because he can tell by the way that Ed works his mouth that he’s also working the brain behind it.

Ed looks at the wall in an idle sort of way, with an expression that mingles wistfulness and mild surprise, and then his tongue moves over his lips before he parts them. “I think I… smothered him. A little bit. Maybe a lot. Just—I was more worried about him than he was. About how things felt, or tasted, or whatever. About him getting hurt, or too tired, or… all the shit you’re supposed to feel. All the shit that’s part of being _alive_. And I think… I think maybe he made a run for it first chance he got.” He turns the too-bright, too-hot, too-incisive eyes on Roy, and it’s all a man can do not to squirm like a moth feeling the tip of the pin. “What do you think?”

“I think it had much more to do with embracing new experiences than with trying to escape from you,” Roy says.

“I don’t know,” Ed says. “And I’m doing that stupid thing where I don’t ask because I’m scared of the answer, so I just end up agonizing about it instead.”

That certainly doesn’t ring tragically familiar, does it?

“I could ask him for you,” Roy says. “And if I don’t think you’ll like the answer, I could replace it with a very convincing lie.”

Ed stares at him for a few seconds. “You think you’re being nice, don’t you?”

“Mostly,” Roy says.

“Mostly thanks,” Ed says. He shifts on the couch, and the way his shoulders move makes Roy’s mouth water, and it takes all of the willpower he has left not to crumple the newspaper in his hands as his fingers try to curl up tight. “Phone calls from Creta are going to be off-the-wall expensive, aren’t they? Just, y’know, theoretically if I want to call you up so that you have a captive audience to be mostly-nice to sometimes. I don’t want you to lose your edge.”

“You’re so thoughtful,” Roy says. “But—yes. I imagine the cost—”

“I could always call you collect,” Ed says.

“That would be less thoughtful,” Roy says. “But you’d be welcome to.”

Ed eyes him for a second. “I still owe you money for a phone call from three years ago. You sure you wanna offer more?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him for several more seconds before concluding with an overstated, whole-body sort of shrug and settling down on the couch again. “Your bank account’s funeral.”

“It lived a full life,” Roy says.

“That’s not funny,” Ed says, but deteriorating eyesight does not stop Roy from noticing how hard he’s trying not to grin.

“You started it,” Roy says.

“You sound like Al,” Ed says. “And don’t you dare take that as a compliment.”

“Too late,” Roy says—more than a bit smugly, but he thinks he’s entitled, just this once.

Ed goes quiet again after that, though, and it’s the sort of quiet that sinks in thick and prickling.

Roy rolls the words around in his mouth for a long time before he takes a breath to speak them. “You don’t have to go.”

Ed blinks up at the ceiling. “Kinda do.”

“No one’s making you,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says. “But no one’s going to miss me.”

Roy’s stomach goes cold. “You _know_ that’s not true.”

“Whatever,” Ed says—calmly, levelly, like it’s just that simple. “Maybe a couple people will, in a conceptual way. Vaguely. If it comes up, y’know. If someone’s talking about something from the old days, or mentions my name, or goes off about alchemy, maybe somebody’ll think ‘Oh, yeah, like when Ed was here’. But nobody’s gonna mess me _bad_. Not so bad that it hurts.”

Maybe it’s just this side of too damn late.

Roy puts the newspaper down.

He sits up straight.

He folds his hands so that Ed won’t see them shaking.

“I will,” he says. “Tremendously.”

Ed snorts. No height or breadth of battlements and castle walls bedecked in banners and ivy, closely guarded and carefully maintained, has ever stood up to the force of his vision of the world around him. “You’ll miss my cooking, you mean.”

“It would be quite dishonest,” Roy says, measuring out one syllable at a time, “to deny that. But that isn’t… I will miss _you_ , Ed. The conversations, and your presence, and your perspective, and your weird and disturbingly tenable interpretation of logic, and all of the innumerable little things that you do, day in and day out, to try to make us both feel more at-home.”

Ed looks at him, intently, for so many seconds that Roy loses count beneath the thunder of his heartbeat.

At last, Ed takes a breath.

And then his eyes narrow.

“Don’t bullshit me,” he says.

“I wouldn’t,” Roy says. “I’m not.”

Ed goes very still. “You—”

“I want you around,” Roy says, looking down at the newspaper. He reaches out to smooth a hand across the front page so that he has something to watch other than Ed’s expression. “I want you here. I mean that. But more than that, I want you to be happy in whatever way you find, or whatever way you can—however you approach it, and whatever that means to you. If you think there’s any chance that Creta will make you happier than you are here, then go. Please go. Go and unearth some brand-new wonders; we both know you will. But if it won’t, or if you’re not sure, or if you just need more time to think on it, then…”

He can’t say it.

He can’t say _Stay_.

Ed never followed any of his orders back when there was a fraction of an obligation; Ed has outgrown all of Roy’s better judgments anyway. Ed deserves better. And Ed is a good enough man that he’d stay out of kindness if Roy bent down and begged.

Roy can’t ask that of him. Not if there’s any chance that anything or anyone else out there might light him up inside.

“I don’t—know,” Ed says.

The softness of his voice draws Roy’s eyes right back to him.

Roy draws a breath, holds it, swallows, wets his lips—

“Don’t know what?” he asks, as gently as he can. This moment feels like it’s suspended from the ceiling, held only by the spindliest of threads; and everything else feels like it’s hanging _on_ this. Like this is the axis on which the rest of their lives might turn.

It is, isn’t it? Or it could be. The most significant single instants in the life of a human being often arrive without the slightest hint of fanfare.

“I like it here,” Ed says.

Roy’s heart squeezes, and his throat stops.

“I like it—a lot,” Ed says, and his gaze flicks up towards the ceiling again as his voice falters. “But I—I mean, people _say_ things; people say—”

He sits up—or, really, he rolls his way upright; all effortless, unnoticed feline grace. He flows like water more than he moves.

“Do you mean it?” he asks. “You—don’t usually lie to people you care about. Not when it really matters. But you’ve lied to me because you thought it’d hurt me more to tell the truth.”

Roy flattens his hand on the newspaper in a last-ditch attempt to stabilize himself.

“Not this time,” he says. “Not now.”

Ed fidgets, and Roy wishes that newspapers had been designed better—that they gave you something to cling to for dear life.

“I really—like it here,” Ed says. “I like… just… killing time with you, you know? Helping each other in the little ways that don’t seem like they make that much of a difference, but they do, and some days they’re _everything_ , and…”

Roy hopes—against hope, perhaps, but he’s been a fighter all his life—that they are having the same conversation. He hopes that Ed is hearing all of this the way he hears it; hopes that they’re both floundering helplessly because it is about so much more than just living on top of each other as a matter of purported convenience.

“And I really like _you_ ,” Ed says. His eyes dart down to where the fingernails of his right hand have started picking at the seam on the couch cushion. “Even when you’re kind of being a bastard. Usually even when you’re _really_ being a bastard. Which probably means I’m sick, and I should go to the hospital immediately so that they can save my life, but—”

His eyes dart up, meet Roy’s, soften slightly, _warm_ —

“That life seems better when you’re around,” Ed says. “So… I mean… if you’re… okay with it, then… I think maybe I should stick around a while.”

“I think,” Roy says, and if he’s very lucky, they can both pretend that his voice doesn’t shake, “that that sounds lovely.”

Ed swallows. He curls his right hand into a fist. And then he grins like a concentrated sunbeam.

“Cool,” he says.

Roy is fully prepared to plunge into a well of depthless despair at that reaction, but then Ed hops up, crosses the carpet in three swift strides, catches Roy’s collar in his right hand, and plants a damp kiss on Roy’s forehead. Before Roy has had more than a split-second to attempt continued respiration, Ed turns on his heel and starts out of the room.

“Done deal,” Ed says as he goes.

It takes Roy a few seconds to recover his voice.

When he’s scrounged it up from where it had retreated to the far side of his shivering heart, he manages, “ _Get_ back here.”

“Nope,” Ed says from what sounds like the proximity of the stairs.

“You’d better,” Roy says, getting up from the couch—which is, as he tries not to think about, infinitesimally more difficult every time. “My vision’s going, remember? If you don’t make yourself evident, I’m not sure you’re large enough that I’ll be able to see you at all.”

Ed starts to make an indignant howling noise, but it collapses into helpless laughter halfway through.

Roy finds him sitting at the bottom of the staircase, sprawled back against the third step with one elbow settled higher—another pointedly casual position summarily betrayed by the cautious way that his eyes track Roy’s every move.

He doesn’t retreat, though, when Roy sits down next to him.

That’s more difficult, too, these days.

Aging is, as Ed would say, absolute bullshit.

But it’s tied in with the whole business of being alive, and Roy supposes he can’t complain about that.

Ed eyes him. “What?”

“Nothing,” Roy says.

Ed rolls the eyes instead. “It has never been ‘nothing’ with you a single time in your entire existence.”

“All right,” Roy says. “A small thing. I thought we should probably address what you just did, rather than running in opposite directions and then circling around each other for several more months.”

Ed flushes hotly, and his eyes go shuttered in an _instant_. “I wasn’t—I mean, if you didn’t—”

Roy catches his shoulder—gently, lightly—and leans in to brush a kiss against his temple.

It is every bit as transcendent as he dreamed of, when he let himself. Ed’s cheek is warm; his hair is silken; his ear is… adorable. What the hell right does he have to possess adorable ears? Roy supposes that Ed’s always been a menace; evidently his ears got the memo early on.

“Equivalent exchange,” Roy says as he draws back. “It’s only fair, isn’t it?”

“No such thing as ‘fair’,” Ed says, but before he can bring his knees up to his chest and bury his face in them, Roy catches him grinning again.

Roy nudges his shoulder against Ed’s. “Did you give notice at the university that you were leaving?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “But they didn’t fill my spot, so they’re probably just gonna be delighted that I changed my mind.”

“I’m sure they will,” Roy says. “I am.”

Ed pantomimes vomiting in extremely graphic detail.

“Would you like me to hold your hair back?” Roy asks.

“I’d like you to stop saying shit like that,” Ed says. “But I know the chances of that happening are about as good as the ones that snowballs get in hell, so I’m cutting my losses here.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Roy asks. “I’d always been told it was called ‘being unnecessarily melodramatic, sir’.”

“That’s ’cause you do it wrong,” Ed says.

“But I do it wrong with _panache_ ,” Roy says.

Ed scrunches up his nose in the way that means he’s half trying not to gag and half trying not to laugh.

Roy loves him. That’s what it is. He’s known for longer than he wants to think about, but creeping around the edges of it can’t change the shape.

Ed elbows him, very gently. “That—the thing I said earlier. About your eyesight going and all. I don’t… I was… two inches is a pretty generous measurement, and on top of that I don’t figure it’s strictly linearly progressive anyway. You’ve probably got a lot more than two and a half years.” He elbows ever so slightly harder. He’s looking at the worn toes of his wool socks, but despite the truth beneath this particular topic of conversation, Roy can still make out a touch of pink in his cheeks. “And it doesn’t matter that much, ’cause you’d look great in glasses. You look great in everything.”

“Thank you,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

Roy feels an odd sort of bubbliness in his chest—the warmest, fizziest premonition of his life, which presages that that specific set of phrases is destined to become a familiar refrain.

“Point is,” Ed says, kicking his right heel at the stair below him, “I shouldn’t’ve said it, and I’m sorry. I just…” He ducks his head so that his bangs mostly hide his eyes. “I kind of… panicked… and… ended up trying to make it sound like you need me.”

“I do need you,” Roy says.

“No, you don’t,” Ed says. “Even if you—” He slants a suspicious glance up through a gap in the hair. “ _Want_ … to have me around sometimes, you don’t need anybody. Least of all—”

“I need your insight,” Roy says, “and your honesty, and your intellect, and your generosity, and your indefatigable sense of humor. Your indefatigable everything, really.”

Ed stares at him warily for much longer than that merited.

“Hey,” Ed says instants before Roy starts to squirm, which would be _very_ undignified, thank you. “If I kiss you, will you never speak a six-syllable word to my face ever again?”

“That’s hardly equivalent,” Roy says.

Ed’s grin flips his stomach inside-out. “Wanna bet?”

“I think you should reconsider the terms of this exchange,” Roy says, which is actually fairly impressive given that his insides have liquified and started to churn like seething lava. “Under that restriction, I could not, for instance, say ‘transmutationally’, which—”

“Isn’t a word,” Ed says.

“Not with that attitude,” Roy says.

Ed’s nose crinkles up again as he tries to scowl against what appears to be an enormous impetus to laugh, and Roy—

Can’t help it.

Can’t resist him.

Can’t fight this.

And he doesn’t have to anymore.

He cups a hand under Ed’s jaw and leans in to kiss away the overstated pout, and Ed starts to laugh in earnest with their mouths an inch apart so that Roy just ends up _swallowing_ the joy.

That’s what it is, as it happens: joy. Blindingly pure and surprisingly simple.

Roy has had perhaps more than his share of satisfying kisses, but he’s never had one quite like this. Ed is, as always, intense and invested and earnest and forward and focused and curious and so fundamentally fearless that he’s unlike anyone else Roy’s ever touched.

Ed’s breath comes quick, and his eyelashes graze Roy’s cheek, and Roy feels the curve of his smile before the press of his tongue. Both, of course, are _delicious_.

Ed draws back long before Roy has the slightest desire to let go, but he has started to feel noticeably lightheaded. Perhaps it’s for the best.

“Well?” Ed says, sounding ever so slightly breathless himself. “Was that worth all your made-up six-syllable words, or what?”

“Mm,” Roy says. “I’ll give you the seven-syllable ones. Most of them.”

Ed’s eyes widen indignantly.

“You,” Roy says, reaching out to tap a fingertip against his nose, “are absolutely extraordinary.”

Ed recoils, pulling a face that’s remarkable even by Elric standards. “You’re not even supposed to pronounce the _A_ in that!”

“You treat language like a chemist,” Roy says.

“You treat it like a maniac,” Ed says. “Like a dictionary-shredder. Like some kind of linguistic-minded _monster_.” He curls his hand in Roy’s collar and grins. “So are you going to kiss me again, or what?”

Roy pauses, trying to turn the gears in his brain faster by force.

Ed hesitates, face starting to fall. “What? Did I—”

“Sorry,” Roy says. “I’m trying to think of a six-syllable word for ‘yes’.”

This face is another record-breaker. “You are a six-syllable word for ‘idiot’.”

“And yet,” Roy says, leaning in to breathe him in along the line of his neck, up over his ear, so tantalizingly near to the endless fall of his beautiful hair; “inexplicably, you decided to stay.”

“Five syllables is pushing it, Mustang,” Ed says.

Sliding both arms around him slowly, Roy can feel his heartbeat everywhere.

“My specialty,” Roy says.

The fingers of Ed’s right hand curl into the hair at the back of Roy’s neck; the other hand smoothes down over his shoulder blade gradually—like its owner can’t quite believe it.

Ed’s voice sounds even sweeter very close to his ear. “You gonna put your mouth where your money is any time tonight?”

“Yes,” Roy says. “ _Exuberantly_. That’s five. But I’m working on another six. You put me on the spot.”

“You are something fuckin’ else,” Ed says, pulling back just far enough for Roy to see him battling another little smirk so devastating that Roy’s fingertips tingle.

“Thank you,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed says, and then he transitions ever so gracefully from biting his lip on a laugh to biting Roy’s.

Roy also needs a six-syllable word for _perhaps the single luckiest night of an undeserving man’s existence_.

He’ll work on that, too.


End file.
